Gupta Receives Best Demo at PerCom 2011

03-31-2011

Aditi Gupta, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science, received Best Demo for her presentation at the PerCom 2011 conference in Seattle, Washington.

The demo presented work that Gupta, along with Dr. N. Asokan and Markus Miettinen, completed during her internship at the Nokia Research Center in Helsinki, Finland. The research, titled "Using Context-profiling to Aid Access Control Decisions in Mobile Devices", focuses on mobile device security and privacy policies. They wanted to find a way for mobile devices to protect sensitive information without requiring the user to make decisions to protect information by utilizing cues, such as a password.

The research team looked into the idea of if a device was intelligent enough to lock itself when the user was in unsafe surroundings (e.g. public transportation), and remain unlocked when in a safe place like (e.g. home, work).

Gupta and her team ended up building a context-profiling system that identifies the significant contexts for a user, like work or home, and estimates their familiarity and safety, based on context-profiling. It uses this safety score to configure the unlocking mechanism and locking timeout in the mobile device. The device will now lock deeply (ex. using password lock) and quickly when in an unfamiliar place. However, it will lock slowly and shallowly (ex. swipe-to-unlock) when in a safe place like home.

More information on this can be found in the PerCom 2011 proceedings.